The tall bringer of death was standing in front of me, shirtless. His hands were held up high as he commanded his Hell fire to bring destruction upon my hometown. “You brought this upon them, Maximus Brinza,” he said, never turning around.
“Lies!” I cried out. I went for my sword but it was gone. I was alone, weaponless in this hellish dream. My greatest enemy just standing there, doing whatever he wanted to break me.
He disappeared into a cloud of smoke, only to reappear beside me. He didn’t reach to touch me, rather taking a position so close I could feel his malevolence. “Much like your forefathers, you chose to take up arms against me with my brother, Radu. Just like them, you will die,” he stated, matter of factly.
“You can’t kill what you’re too scared to confront.”
“Scared? Of you?” Vlad looked as if I told him a funny joke. “I have so many more important things to accomplish than to personally see to your deaths. That is why I sent my shades, a shadow daemon army to kill you. Look at you now,” he said, waving his hands around. “Trapped in your own mind, stuck talking to what may or may not be the real Vlad Dracul. I do believe I have proven my point.”
His smugness was getting the better of me, whether this was real or fantasy. “Enough of this!” I shouted. I reached my arm back and swung my punch into his midsection. It connected, but caused little effect.
“Is that the best you can do?” he asked. He… the shade, not the real Vlad. Its inflections were too close to the old man I dealt with before the possession took place. This wasn’t Vlad, this was a poor imitation.
“Sorry to disappoint you, shade,” I spoke. I straightened back up. “If you aren’t the real Vlad, I have no need to continue this game of misdirection.”
The scene changed. No longer was Vlad standing beside me, but my grandfather, Denis. “I have many forms, human. I can plumb into your deepest memories to pull out terror.” A sword shot through my grandfather’s back and he fell to the ground, dead. Blood leaked from him and began to pool around my boots as his lifeless eyes dug deep into my soul.
Another change. This time the shade took the form of the witch, Esmerelda. Only she was disfigured, burns covered her face and one of her ears was lying on the ground. She jeered at me. “Your fate will be the same as mine, grandson.”
I didn’t even have time to adjust to that when the shade went for one more metamorphosis. Two bodies were on the ground—Radu and Abigail. A wooden stake was buried into Radu’s heart and Abigail’s eyes were ripped from her head. She was crawling towards me, her fingers bleeding from scraping against the harsh ground. “Maximus,” she cried out.
“I’m here, Abigail!” I knew it wasn’t real but emotions were starting to well up inside. My mind was playing tricks on me, being corrupted. I remembered what the real Abigail had told me. “It’s okay,” I soothed to the hallucination.
She collapsed right before she got to me. “We were no match for him.”
That’s when I knew for sure this wasn’t the same Seer I’d grown to care for. “It’ll be okay,” I said one more time. That’s when I reached out and grabbed the fake Abigail around the neck and began strangling it. “It’ll be okay, as I return you to Hell, daemon.”
The illusion began to break, the shade’s mental torture over, as it died inside me.
Chapter Twenty
W hen I returned to the safe house, Abigail was there and heavy of breath. “Were you attacked by a shade, too?” she asked.
“I was.” The visions the shade showed me were still messing with my mind. The most vivid of them being the one where I had to kill an exact replica of Abigail to kill the shade. My hands were trembling. “It was an experience I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy.”
As the two of us tried to remain calm, something was amiss. Horus wasn’t here. When we had left, the older Father was to stay behind and keep vigil for us. The house was empty, an eerie feeling looming just out of sight. Then a horrible thought struck me—what if Horus had been killed?
Standing up, “Stay here, Abigail. I’m going to check to see if something is here with us.”
With my sword out, I kicked open the first of the three bedrooms, mine. No one was there, but my few possessions had been tossed around. My heavier jacket was on the floor and a pair of pants were ripped in two. I slowly exited and proceeded to go into Radu’s room, beside my own.
I hadn’t been in this room. Radu had even less possessions than I did and his room looked unmolested. With only one last room to check, I raised my sword high, knowing whatever ill feelings I had, they must be originating from Abigail’s room. I twisted the door handle and it was locked. I backed up and used my shoulder to break the door down.
Horus was standing there, an evil look in his eyes—the same look that the man possessed by the shade had in his.
“Yes, Maximus,” the voice acknowledged. “You let your enemy grow close and comfortable.”
How long had Horus been a shade? Were we that blinded by discovering another ally that we sabotaged ourselves? I tried to cut him down with a quick attack, but he moved at blinding speeds; even faster than the shade from the alleyway. He danced around two more times just to show his superiority to me. I bit down and gripped my sword harder.
“I see it, the self-doubt creeping in. You embraced the ideals I presented so quickly that you didn’t even take into account the basic art of self-preservation. A few simple questions would’ve outed me as an enemy from the beginning.”
“And you should’ve killed us before revealing yourself as one of Vlad’s minions.”
“On that we agree.” He sat down on Abigail’s bed, as if this was nothing more than a tiring inconvenience. “Unfortunately, there’s a piece of the puzzle hidden here. I needed to find it for my master.”
An arrow soared through the air, just past my face and into the forehead of the shade. The velocity on it was so great that it didn’t stop moving until half of the arrow shaft was sticking out of the back of the old man’s head. Bits of the skull had exploded all over her bed and pink brain matter covered the walls. It was an impressive shot, a blow that would kill any man.
Horus was dead. The shade was not. The room chilled over and Abigail and I were sucked into another monstrous hallucination. This shade seemed intent on picking up where the last one had stopped tormenting me. Beside Abigail was her dead doppelganger, the one I had killed in my vision.
The shade began talking to us. “Is this the kind of ally you want, Daughter of Dracul? One who would kill you if given the chance?”
“I killed a shade, not my companion,” I fired back.
The daemon didn’t stop. “Look at your broken body and know that Maximus Brinza had no qualms about killing you. He told you it would be okay, right before he put his hands around your throat and choked the life out.”
There was a part of this that was more amusing than anything. “Horus,” Abigail addressed the shade with its host’s name. “I can’t see.”
The shade had made the one mistake that it should never have made. Torturing me with visual torments would work, but this one had forgotten that Abigail couldn’t see her dead body on the ground. For all she knew, the shade was telling her lies just to create conflict. That’s when she reached out with a hand, feeling around the empty air and plucked the daemon from the blackness surrounding us.
A shadow appeared. It wriggled under her grasp but couldn’t break free. “Your follies are numerous,” Abigail said. “You gave me information and then forgot what you knew about me. Your arrogance is what’s going to get you killed today.”
“No!!” it screamed. Abigail’s iron grip tightened around it.
As the daemon’s attempts to save its own life multiplied, Abigail went on talking as if it were a casual conversation. “In an attempt to make it appear as if you were our friend, you told me about the one weakness no one knew about the shades—if one is able to resist the scene and kill the memory attempted to drive us insane, then you die, to
o. Radu and Maximus knew that before we left.”
I watched as life left the daemon’s black, misshapen body. When the illusion broke and we were back in the safe house, the first thing I saw was Horus’s dead body. It was a shame an innocent had to die, but we were in a war with Evil itself. There would be casualties.
Hell, I was beginning to sound like Radu.
That’s when I noticed the vampyre in the room. “So he was the last shade,” he stated. He went over and pulled the arrow from Horus’s head and shut his eyes. Another unexpected sign of humanity from him.
“Yes, I killed one in the alley and Abigail killed this one and another,” I explained.
“One attacked me as well. It was quite… disturbing,” he drifted off.
It had been an eventful night. The shades felt as if they were the last obstacle that kept us from Vlad himself. The way Radu spoke of them, I almost expected a bigger challenge. Granted, it was nothing I’d want to relive again, but we were able to overcome it well enough. Maybe our powers had grown to the point where we were more than just threats to Vlad. Maybe we were the ones to end this nightmare spreading across Europe.
There was an explosion of fire in the middle of our room, blowing up the safe house and sending the three of us scattering into the Milan night. Fire caught on my left arm, and as I hit the ground, I quickly rolled in the dusty street to put it out. I couldn’t see either Abigail or Radu, just the one figure who was supposed to be hundreds of kilometers away.
The tall, shirtless figure of Vlad Dracul walked out of the carnage his entrance into Milan had caused. He walked right over to me and plucked me up as easily as a grown man picks up a babe. “The latest Brinza,” he spoke in Latin. “A disappointment.” He tossed me away as if I were trash.
The force of the throw sent me through a brick wall on the south side of the alley. The structure had been in bad shape, so to add insult to my injuries, the second floor collapsed on top of me. I was pinned to the ground by the broken bricks.
His hand reached through and pulled me out again. I knew for sure my ribs were broken and quite possibly my shoulder as well. Even as his daemon eyes surveyed me, my thoughts were for Radu and Abigail.
“You look like your father but smell like your grandfather,” he observed.
My jaw was sore but not broken. “Piss off,” I suggested and kicked him in the chest with my boot. The blow surprised him and I freed myself. My sword was still intact and I armed myself. “Prepare to die, vampyre.”
“Do you think you can kill me?” he laughed. “Please.” He waved his hand and a fireball fell from the sky and nearly incinerated me. I barely escaped that, but not his punch attack. I heard multiple bones snap. I dropped my sword to the ground and he picked it up. “You won’t be needing this anymore.” With his hands, he snapped the blade off and threw the two pieces to the side.
From above, the shadow of Radu was falling towards his brother, only to be caught with his other hand. “And you,” Vlad spat. “I wish you would die already.”
He didn’t give Radu a chance to answer. He sank his fangs into his brother’s neck and ripped the side wide open. He then dropped a bleeding, dying Radu onto the streets to suffer before death overtook him.
That’s when I saw Abigail’s body. She wasn’t moving, just lying there face down, her arms stretched out at odd angles. It was quite clear she’d been the closest of us to the explosion that Vlad used to enter Milan. Bile rose in my throat knowing that Abigail was dead and Radu wasn’t far behind.
That’s when I knew my end was coming. Except it didn’t. “Your grandfather and father were worthy of dying by my hand. I won’t grant you the same honor. Your suffering will be living in Drakovia, knowing you couldn’t stop me.”
“Coward,” I called up to him. “Kill me—do it!” But my goading wouldn’t bring the end I so desperately wanted in that moment. All Vlad did was look at me in shame, proving he truly didn’t believe me to be a threat to him. After what he just did to us, he was right.
He turned to leave and that’s when I noticed the distinct shape of the hilt that once rested on my grandfather’s blade. Vlad, it seemed, had kept the broken end as a souvenir. My last act of defiance was to reach up and snatch it off his belt. I was rewarded with a boot to the face, breaking my nose and removing me from my consciousness.
“Arrogance and vanity always lead to a downfall.
The Bible tells us, Philippians 2:3, Do nothing out
of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility,
value others above yourself. Those who allow vanity
to rule will end up toppled.”
Sermon by Elder Darius (Stefania, 1771 the year of our Lord)
Chapter Twenty One
**Spain; 1778 the year of our Lord**
“M ax, put your back into it! For God’s sake, man,” the crusty old captain yelled in Spanish.
My Spanish wasn’t fantastic, but in the two and a half years I’d lived here, I knew enough to get me by and then some. “Yes, sir,” I responded.
The fishing vessel had just come in from the dark blue waters of the ocean, its storage deck loaded to capacity with fish and other oddities from the depths. Rota, while not the most ideal spot to live, was one of the last bastions that wasn’t plagued by the malice of the cross. That’s what the locals called it anyway, the cruel treatment that the Vatican was doling out on a regular basis.
No one knew me here. I wasn’t a Brinza, a failed hunter that suffered humiliation and injury at the hands of Vlad Dracul. With no allies to be found when I awoke from his bludgeoning, I crawled into the night, never to be seen again. We failed. No, I failed. Radu and Abigail were dead and with them, the hopes that Europe would see the goodness of God ever again.
As I finished my shift of unloading fish from the boat, there was only one good place to go. I found my way to the bar, yet again, and drank away the pain in my shoulder and the nightmares that would never leave me.
Each day was the same thing. Wake up in the terrible little hovel I called home, go to the docks to await the captain’s orders, and then drink it all away again. My only possession of value, besides my Bible, was the hilt to my grandfather’s sword, which I carried with me like a totem. The cross was the only thing left on me that was good.
Sleep never came easy to me. Every so often I would find myself looking through the eyes of Esmerelda, the witch. I conditioned my body to immediately wake up to break the connection and drink from the bottle of whiskey I kept close to my bed. Only once everything was removed from my mind would I attempt to lie back down. Some nights I fell back to sleep, others I shook uncontrollably until the morning sun came up.
Last night was one of the shaking nights. As I left my house, I was covered in sweat and could barely stand.
My instincts as a hunter had dulled, but not enough to the point where I wouldn’t know someone was close by, watching me.
“Who’s there?” I cried out in my broken Spanish.
The response came in the form of German common to Moldavia. “It’s taken me a long time to find you.” The voice belonged to my best childhood friend, Julius. “Rumors of a broken man with an ill aura to him—that’s what got me to this point.”
Julius hadn’t aged a day since I last saw him. Thankful to drop the foreign language in favor of my own, I greeted him as a friend should. “Just what the hell are you doing in Spain?”
He chuckled at my response. “When a friend needs to be reminded of who he is, someone has to undertake the dirty task of bringing him out of despair. God has called me to do this work.”
Julius took a step forward and removed the book that had been sticking out of my knapsack. That Bible he’d given me, it had been through a lot since the day I left Stefania with Radu. The fact that the binding was still holding said a lot about the workmanship and care given to such an important book.
“Even in as dark a place as you are, you still turn to the Lord for guidance. The book has been rea
d recently,” he observed.
“But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind,” I recited.
The irony of the passage and where Julius found me wasn’t lost on him. “James 1:6—a fairly good choice given the seaside town we are currently conversing in.”
While quoting Bible verses was about as good a pastime as one would find in Rota, I was growing tired of the tiptoeing. “You should know a lost cause when you see one. I’m a lost cause, Julius.”
“You’re lost, I will give you that, but the Lord believes it’s time to be found.” His hand found my dirty, smelly tunic. “The world still needs its hunter and that, Maximus Brinza, is you.”
“I failed!” I couldn’t keep it together anymore. “My companions are dead and I might as well be. Do you know what he said to me right before he left me to rot?” Julius shook his head. “He said I wasn’t worthy to be killed by him. Not like my grandfather and father before me. Vlad told me my punishment for failure was to live and do nothing.”
Even in the face of my outburst, the melancholy expression on his face didn’t change. “And that will be his greatest folly, allowing one with the power inside to defeat him to live.”
I fell back against the wall of the hovel and slumped down to the wet cobblestone street. I didn’t know what more to say to this infuriating man to get him to leave me alone. “My time is over. I’m tired and I just want to live out whatever years I have left in peace.”
My friend didn’t answer; instead he directed another to come into the alley. “This is him, Alejandro. And by God, he has his grandfather’s sword, or at least the hilt.” Julius rubbed his chin. “He’ll need a weapon for what I have planned for him.”
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